- It is conceptually two Richter harmonicas stacked on one another. Slide out is the "key" of the harmonica, slide in is basically another richter harp a semitone higher. It is currently available in C, A, G, D, Bb, and LowF, which if you ordered a full set would give you a richter harp in every key except for E.
- Price. It costs less than $90 USD. But since it's conceptually 2 harps in one, you could think of it as $45 per harp, but now they are sandwiched together so you can quickly borrow notes from the other harp.
- Expressive bending. It bends like a well made diatonic. It bends beautifully.
- It plays very airtight out of the box. I am not the best overblow but I was able to to get an ugly overblow on it.
- It is very compact. Just barely bigger than a diatonic, and much smaller than the EastTop 10 hole chromatic which is the other 10 hole chromatic I have to compare with it.
- It is easy to disassemble and reassemble. I can take it fully apart and put it back together in about a minute.
- It comes in three different popular tunings, Richter, Paddy Richter, and Solo
- The wonky "Jetsons" look. Yes it looks unique. Some people probably really like that. I like unique looking stuff as well but this thing just makes me feel like Mr. Spacely is about to show up at any minute and scream at me to get back to work.
- An addition to the above point, the fact the reedplates and comb are not convenient rectangles makes for more work for customizers, although I'm sure it could present some surprise advantages
- The Slide: It adds 16mm ( 5/8 of an inch) extra length the overall thing. Without that extra length the Trochilus would be about as pocket sized as a diatonic
- The Slide: The way it was designed it cannot be easily flipped upside down to switch which key is the "slide out" key.
- The Slide: Slides are inherently fragile and add fragidity to the harmonica. You can't simply pocket it, it needs to be carried in a hard case, if you drop it and bend the slide you are SOL, etc.
- I wish it came in more tunings. Being able to get a Powerbender version out of the box would make my life a lot easier
Here I have taken some photos comparing the Trochilus with a Seydel 1847. In a couple photos I removed the slide, just so you can see, without the slide, just how close to a diatonic it actually gets.
In the bottom two photos Notice how different the size looks without the slider vs with the slider